Burying the Lead

Lawrence Sumulong

This event has concluded

Dates: 19700101

Entry Fee: Free

Exhibition Event:

Official Opening 30/04/2016 6:00 pm

Following Typhoon Haiyan, 60 Filipino families were forced to move into Leyte Provincial Jail after being left homeless and destitute. For close to a year, they lived alongside their incarcerated relatives, some of whom were accused of rape and homicide.

Since this series was shot, the families have long since left the jail, but their fates are unknown to me. I began to question where these people and these portraits fit into my own life as a result. It disturbed me how quickly news breaks and inevitably disappears while one’s images remain interred in the archive. In 2015, I resurrected this series by creating one-of-a-kind ambrotypes (photographs on glass) using the 19th century wet-plate collodion process out of my original digital files with the help of Molly Rapp of The Penumbra Foundation and photographer Lisa Elmaleh.

Everything about this series is obscure from the aesthetic to the location itself. The captions are traditional Filipino riddles that I’ve collected and view as parts of a poem. They present questions or statements with no immediate answer. As opposed to an exercise engaging in nostalgia, my decisions emerged from a need to consecrate and imbue these seemingly direct images of Filipino faces with the fragility and unseen idiosyncrasies of that traumatic moment in time.

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